BI 096 Keisuke Fukuda and Josh Cosman: Forking Paths

K, Josh, and I were postdocs together in Jeff Schall’s and Geoff Woodman’s labs. K and Josh had backgrounds in psychology and were getting their first experience with neurophysiology, recording single neuron activity in awake behaving primates. This episode is a discussion surrounding their reflections and perspectives on neuroscience and psychology, given their backgrounds and experience (we reference episode 84 with György Buzsáki and David Poeppel). We also talk about their divergent paths – K stayed in academia and runs an EEG lab studying human decision-making and memory, and Josh left academia and has worked for three different pharmaceutical and tech companies. So this episode doesn’t get into gritty science questions, but is a light discussion about the state of neuroscience, psychology, and AI, and reflections on academia and industry, life in lab, and plenty more.

• The Fukuda Lab.
• Josh’s website.
• Twitter: @KeisukeFukuda4

Time stamps
0:00 – Intro
4:30 – K intro
5:30 – Josh Intro
10:16 – Academia vs. industry
16:01 – Concern with legacy
19:57 – Best scientific moment
24:15 – Experiencing neuroscience as a psychologist
27:20 – Neuroscience as a tool
30:38 – Brain/mind divide
33:27 – Shallow vs. deep knowledge in academia and industry 
36:05 – Autonomy in industry
42:20 – Is this a turning point in neuroscience?
46:54 – Deep learning revolution
49:34 – Deep nets to understand brains
54:54 – Psychology vs. neuroscience
1:06:42 – Is language sufficient?
1:11:33 – Human-level AI
1:13:53 – How will history view our era of neuroscience?
1:23:28 – What would you have done differently?
1:26:46 – Something you wish you knew